Free Republic

“We have to look at the root cause of why the economy is struggling as much as it is,” Santorum said. “Government intervention. Government regulation. Government taxation. Government is crushing and destroying the American spirit and the American free enterprise system.” Santorum said that government spending was impinging on personal freedoms and ultimately chipping away at what made the country great. “When the government gets as big as it’s gotten and starts to take over more of your life, then you get smaller as the individual, you get weaker, you lose control over your lives. You lose the rights that...

As the junior senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum shepherded welfare reform through the U.S. Senate in 1996. Given his limited tenure — he’d been elected to the Senate only two years before — the fact that Majority Leader Bob Dole selected Santorum to lead the effort is nothing short of remarkable, Santorum’s former colleagues say. It also is a testament to an overlooked virtue of the ex-senator’s: his pragmatism.

The guy who apologized for criticizing Paul Ryan's Entitlement Reform Plan as right-wing social engineering is now heavily supporting Medicare in the Sunshine State, which is home for many seniors. Voters across the country who wonder about Newt's questionable past have received replies from Newt and his supporters to look past those negatives since they have already been repented for, apologized for, or flipped on. Focus should therefore be given only to his current conservative talk and the cherry-picked positive aspects of his past. www.americanthinker.com

Morgen and John at Verum Serum dug up this nugget, and not from 15 years ago when the Heritage Foundation had its brief and ill-advised fling with individual health-insurance mandates at the federal level. This comes from a May 2009 conference call hosted by Newt Gingrich on the subject of health-care reform as ObamaCare had just begun its tortured path through Congress. In this clip, Gingrich specifically calls for individual “must carry” mandates, and even notes that the insurance companies agreed that such a law would make “must issue” a better deal for them.

Rick Santorum - “I wrote the welfare reform bill in the Contract with America. I was the ranking member on that subcommittee. And when I came to the Senate, through a quirk, I ended up managing the bill on the floor of the United States Senate and working with President Clinton and getting a bill signed after he vetoed it twice to end welfare. We bloc-granted the program, got rid of the federal entitlement -- the only one in the history of the country that’s ever been done. And I was the principal author of it in the United States...

Steve Detwiler went 4-for-4, including a pair of homers, and drove in all the runs for Fresno State, which won its first College World Series championship with a 6-1 victory over Georgia.